Free magazine!

1 April 2008 — dan

The Skeptic is the official publication of the Australian Skeptics. It's edited by Barry Williams, who has kindly made the digital version of this year's Autumn edition (The Skeptic is published four times a year, and it is of course now autumn here in Australia) available for free. That's an eleven Australian dollar value, at the standard one-year subscription rate!

In this edition: A Psychic Course On How To Contact Missing Persons And The Deceased, The Placebo Effect Explained, Vitalism and Mystical Energies and, as they say, more.

The PDF file is only 5.75Mb, and I've made a torrent of it to save Barry from his previous distribution method, which was manually e-mailing the file to people who asked for it. And yes, he specifically asked me to do this, just as Tim Hunkin asked everyone to distribute The Secret Life Of Machines.

Y'all can download the torrent right here.

(If you, like Barry, are still a bit hazy about what this BitTorrent thing actually is, this beginners' guide should help you out.)

Posted in Scams, Science, Strange Tales. 4 Comments »

The Acme 18-Servo Hexapodal Cat-Frightener

12 March 2008 — dan

Phoenix is the winner of the Trossen Robotics TRC Project Contest...

...and deservedly so.

She's a little small to really conquer the indoor environment, but the design is very scalable; I think a double-size Phoenix made with super-torque standard-sized servos or the big quarter-scale ones could scuttle up ordinary stairs quite easily.

(One could, in fact, be climbing your stairs right now. What was that noise?)

More at the forum thread.

(Via.)

[UPDATE: It's now available as a kit!]

Posted in Hacks, Nerdery, Toys. 23 Comments »

72 years and counting

12 March 2008 — dan

Modern Mechanix has been so good as to reprint the Popular Mechanics article BEWARE The Gasoline DOPE Racket, describing a bunch of worthless fuel additives which are, in promises and even in composition, the same darn thing that umpteen companies are still selling to suckers today. (Regular readers of this blog may be able to name at least one of these companies.)

The date of the article?

November, 1936.

(See also "Impossibility of Perpetual Motion Shown at Chicago Fair", from September 1934.)

Posted in Cars, Scams, Science. 7 Comments »

Perhaps the face paint will get people to listen

10 March 2008 — dan

More videos that you've probably already seen, but which are new to clueless me (via):

The punch was what really sold it for me.

Mr Flare also had a large role in Babylon 5.

An excellent guide to the practical skeptical outlook.

Including something Amazing in the sky.

A great summing-up of this recent story, albeit with some disturbing attention paid to YouTube comments.

He really needs to stop reading those comments. Set the comment threshold to "excellent (+10 or better)" and all of that troublesome text will just... go away.

More at Captain Disillusion's YouTube channel.

Posted in Nerdery, Scams, Science. 6 Comments »

I'm just not sure

10 March 2008 — dan

Should I participate in a link exchange program with http://kundaliniforyou.com/, the Web site for Robert Morgens' Kundalini Awakening Program?

Robert's e-mailed me twice asking, now [and he's now sent me a third "reminder", on the 15th of March]. Clearly, he not only noticed my never-ending stream of approval for linking schemes, but also saw how keen I am about New-Age alternative medicine of all sorts (this page is ten years old now...), and is confident that I therefore do not consider every damn thing Robert's done since he left school to be pure poison to anything that's decent in the world.

Kundalini yoga is apparently supposed to enrich you emotionally, intellectually, physically and spiritually, so I'm sure Robert's enlightened mind gave him some sort of gestalt awareness of the raving quack that lives within me, despite my pathetic attempts to deny it in every single page where I said anything at all about anything remotely related to everything Robert says is true.

Robert is, I and he hasten to add, a Reiki Master who holds a Black Belt in Hoshinjutsu. He's also the founder of Work From Home Magazine (perhaps this one, perhaps not), Harmony Magazine (your guess is, again, as good as mine), Combat Hapkido Journal (which appears to be the world's only "Ezine" that does not have a Web site...) and not one but two Kundalini Awakening Podcasts! (How awakened does the serpent coiled at the base of your spine need to be?)

Oh, and he's also apparently a professional network marketer! I'm sure you all know how much I love marketing people!

And, as if that weren't enough, he is - or at least was - eager to help you Apply the Law of Attraction!

So I'm in a quandary. Should I send him lots of traffic, or not?

Posted in Scams, Science. 5 Comments »

I'll take "things that burn asbestos" for $100

5 March 2008 — dan

The sadly neglected "Things I Won't Work With" category of Derek Lowe's organic chemistry blog (previously) now has another entry, as a result of an innocent inquiry regarding what chemicals will, if you dump sand on them to try to stop them burning, start cheerfully burning the sand.

It turns out that chlorine trifluoride (merely discovering that one Cl and three Fs can in fact be squished together should send shivers up the spine of anyone who was paying any attention at all in high school chemistry) is a party looking for a place to happen.

Posted in Nerdery, Science, Strange Tales. 11 Comments »

Takin Suckaz Assets

5 March 2008 — dan

I'm probably the last person in the world to discover this, but the TSA Gangstaz music video is, I'm given to understand the kids today are saying, da bomb.

NOTE: Naughty NSFW dirty offensive words!

And now, Why I Wrote This Song, by the rather Jewish perpetrator, Zach Selwyn:

There haven't actually been all that many responses so far, but this one right here is perfectly awesome.

(Via.)

Posted in Humour, Music. 2 Comments »

Not yet tested: Barbed wire, train tracks

4 March 2008 — dan

A few people have e-mailed me to mention this Consumerist post, which links to an Audioholics forum post which I could have sworn I myself linked to a while ago, though I may be mistaken. All of the "audiophile" bulldust kind of merges together in my mind after a while.

Anyway, the gist of the post is that fancy Monster-brand speaker cables "sound" the same as wire coat hangers, as any electrophysicist would tell you they would, but as the entire fancy-audio-cable industry insists they would not.

(Wire hangers are not, of course, actually very practical for most speaker-cabling tasks. Numerous less dramatic tests have demonstrated that so-called audiophiles can't tell the difference between fancy cables and lamp cord.)

But wait, there's more.

Here is a test of wire hangers versus fancy cables for home theatre digital interconnect applications, which turned up similar results. Again, this is entirely unsurprising from a physics point of view, but is completely contrary to the heated claims from many magic-cable vendors.

I invite you to link to any other, similar tests in the comments.

(Actually, despite this post's headline, I'm pretty sure that someone actually has tested rusty old barbed wire against "audiophile" cables of one kind or another. I do know for a fact that sending hundred-megabit Ethernet over barbed wire was a pretty well-known demo back in the days when 100BaseT was super-technology.)

Posted in Electricity, Music, Scams, Science. 10 Comments »
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